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In this installment, David Roderick reads “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Roderick's first book, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was published jointly by The American Poetry Review and Copper Canyon Press in 2006. He is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, as would have been
Most sweet to have remembrance, even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hilltop edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; —that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.

Now my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! For thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend,
Struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.

A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight: and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promised good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blessed it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

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In this installment, Stuart Greenhouse reads “Mont Blanc” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Greenhouse's poems have appeared in journals such as Antioch Review, Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Fence, Paris Review, and Ploughshares. His chapbook, What Remains, was chosen for a National Chapbook Fellowship and was published by the Poetry Society of America in 2005.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni"

I

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters--with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

II

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve--dark, deep Ravine--
Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest;--thou dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
Children of elder time, in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
To hear--an old and solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep
Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound--
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

III

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.--I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there--how hideously
Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.--Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
None can reply--all seems eternal now.
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

IV

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,
Ocean, and all the living things that dwell
Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep
Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound
With which from that detested trance they leap;
The works and ways of man, their death and birth,
And that of him and all that his may be;
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.
Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,
And their place is not known. Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air

V

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:--the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its homes
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

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In this installment, Paula Bohincereads “The Lamb” by William Blake. Bohince’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, Antioch Review, Field, Green Mountains Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily and Best New Poets 2005. She has received the Grolier Poetry Prize, residencies from the MacDowell Colony, and artist's grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

William Blake, "The Lamb"

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

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In this installment, Oliver de la Paz reads “O Solitude!” by John Keats. Paz teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. He is a recipient of a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He has worked with Kundiman as faculty/staff since 2004, and he currently serves on their Advisory Board. Oliver's poems have appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Cream City Review, Third Coast, North American Review, and elsewhere. Names Above Houses, a book of his prose and verse, was a winner of the 2000 Crab Orchard Award Series and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. His second collection of poems, Furious Lullaby, will be published in 2007 by SIU Press.

John Keats, "O Solitude!"

O SOLITUDE! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—
Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

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In this installment, Don Paterson reads “To Shakespeare" by Hartley Coleridge. Paterson is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Nil Nil (1993), which was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, God's Gift to Women (1997), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Landing Light (2003), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. He has also been awarded an Eric Gregory Award, a Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award, and his poem 'A Private Bottling' won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition in 1993. Other published volumes include adaptations of poems by Machado and Rilke, contemporary plays, and several collected anthologies. He is poetry editor for Picador (London). His recitation of Hartley Coleridge's poem was recorded live at the International Coleridge Conference in Cannington, UK.

Hartley Coleridge, "To Shakespeare"

THE SOUL of man is larger than the sky,
Deeper than ocean or the abysmal dark
Of the unfathom’d centre. Like that Ark
Which in its sacred hold uplifted high,
O’er the drown’d hills, the human family,
And stock reserv’d of every living kind,
So, in the compass of the single mind,
The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie,
That make all worlds. Great Poet, ’t was thy art
To know thyself, and in thyself to be
Whate’er love, hate, ambition, destiny,
Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart,
Can make of Man. Yet thou wert still the same,
Serene of thought, unhurt by thy own flame.

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In this installment, Don Paterson reads “Let me not deem that I was made in vain” by Hartley Coleridge. Paterson is the author is numerous volumes of poetry, including Nil Nil (1993), which was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, God's Gift to Women (1997), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Landing Light (2003), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. He has also been awarded an Eric Gregory Award, a Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award, and his poem 'A Private Bottling' won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition in 1993. Other published volumes include adaptations of poems by Machado and Rilke, contemporary plays, and several collected anthologies. He is poetry editor for Picador (London). His recitation of Hartley Coleridge's poem was recorded live at the International Coleridge Conference in Cannington, UK.

Hartley Coleridge, "Let me not deem that I was made in vain"

LET me not deem that I was made in vain,
Or that my being was an accident
Which Fate, in working its sublime intent,
Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.
Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain
Hath its own mission, and is duly sent
To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent
'Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.
The very shadow of an insect's wing,
For which the violet cared not while it stayed,
Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,
Proved that the sun was shining by its shade.
Then can a drop of the eternal spring,
Shadow of living lights, in vain be made?

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In this installment, Steve Orlenreads “The Instinct of Hope” by John Clare. Orlen is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Permission to Speak (1978), A Place at the Table (1981), The Bridge of Sighs (1992), Kisses (1997), and This Particular Eternity (2001). His work had been honored with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He teaches at the University of Arizona and in the low-residency MFA at Warren Wilson College.

John Clare, "The Instinct of Hope"

Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Something about me daily speaks there must,
And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?
'Tis nature's prophesy that such will be,
And everything seems struggling to explain
The close sealed volume of its mystery.
Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace
As seeming anxious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E'en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?

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In this installment, Peter Riley reads “A Winter Hymn to the Snow” by Ebenezer Jones. Jones is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Love-Strife Machine (1968), The Linear Journal (1973), Lines on the Liver (1981), Tracks and Mineshafts (1983), Sea Watches (1991), Alstonefield and Distant Points (1995), Noon Province (1996), Snow has Settled . . . Bury Me Here (1997), The Dance at Mociu (2003), and Excavations (2004). The recent special issue of The Gig/Poetry (4:5, 2000) was dedicated to the discussion of his verse and his contribution to British poetry.

Ebenezer Jones, "A Winter Hymn to the Snow"

Come o'er the hills, and pass unto the wold,
And all things, as thou passest, in rest upfold,
Nor all night long thy ministrations cease;
Thou succourer of young corn, and of each seed
In plough'd land sown, or lost on rooted mead,
And bringer everywhere of exceeding peace!

Beneath the long interminable frost
Earth's landscapes all their excellent force have lost,
And stripp'd and abject each alike appears;
Not now to adore can they exalt the soul,---
Panic, or anger, or unrest control,---
Or aid the loosening of Affliction's tears.

No more doth Desolateness lovely sit
Lone on the moor; no more around her flit
From far high-travelling heaven the sailing shades;
The shrunk grass shivers feebly; reed and sedge,
By frozen marsh, by rivulet's iron edge,
Bow, blent into the ice, mix'd stems and blades.

The mountains soar not, holding high in heaven
Their mighty kingdoms, but all downward driven
Seem shrunken haggard ridges running low;
And all about stand drear upon the leas,
Like giant thorns, the frozen skeleton trees,
Dead to the winds that ruining through them go.

The woodland rattles in the sudden gusts;
Frozen through frozen brakes the river thrusts
His arm forth stiffly, like one slain and cold;
The glory from the horizon-line has fled;
One sullen formless gloom the skies are spread,
And black the waters of the lakes are roll'd.

Come! Daughter fair of Sire the sternest, come,
And bring the world relief! to rivers numb
Give garments, cover broadly the broad land;
All trees with thy resistless gentleness
Assume, and in thine own white vesture dress,
And hush all nooks with thy persistings bland.

Come! making rugged gorge and rocky height
Even more than fur of ermine soft and white,
And cover up and silence roads and lanes;
And, while the ravish'd wind sleeps hush'd and still,
Wreaths, little infancy with glee to fill,
Upheap at doorways and at casement-panes.

Fancy's most potent pandar! gentlest too:
Man, rising on the morn, the scene will view
Thus, all transform'd, with no less sweet surprise
Than stirreth him to whose half-doubting sight
Sudden appears beloved friend, masqued bright
In not less fair than unexpected guise.

And some will think the earth, in white robes drest,
Seems sinking fast in a great trance of rest,
Beyond all further reach of wintry ill;
And some will say it seems as though a ghost
Appear'd; and thus, on fancy's seas far toss'd,
With doubtful shadowy joys their spirits fill.

Thy task complete, if to the amazing scene
With Night should come, full-orb'd, Night's radiant Queen,
How the whole race from out their homes will gaze!
Hard hearts will restless grow, and mean men sigh,
And wish they could be holier, and on high
Some, whispering words of heaven, meek thanks will raise.

I, sweet celestial kisser! from croft home-crown'd,
From ancient mead by stateliest trees girt round,
From wilds where thou the earth lovest all alone,
Shall watch thee shower thy kisses, and all the hours
Rapt worship solemnize, and bless the Powers
That let thy loveliness to my soul be known!

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In this installment, Thorpe Moeckel reads “Winter Fields” by John Clare. Moeckel’s first book of poems, Odd Botany, was published in 2002 by Silverfish Review Press, and his chapbooks include Meltlines, The Guessing Land, and Making a Map of the River. New poems and essays are forthcoming in Verse, Virginia Quarterly Review, Rivendell, and North Carolina Literary Review. He earned an MFA in 2002 at University of Virginia, where he was a Jacob K. Javits and Henry Hoyns Fellow. A former Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, he now teaches at Hollins University.

John Clare, "Winter Fields"

Oh, for a pleasant book to cheat the sway
Of winter---where rich mirth with hearty laugh
Listens and rubs his legs on corner seat;
For fields are mire and sludge---and badly off
Are those who on their pudgy paths delay;
There striding shepherd, seeking driest way,
Fearing night's wetshod feet and hacking cough
That keeps him waken till the peep of day,
Goes shouldering onward and with ready hook
Progs oft to ford the sloughs that nearly meet
Across the lands; croodling and thin to view,
His loath dog follows---stops and quakes and looks
For better roads, till whistled to pursue;
Then on with frequent jump he hurkles through.

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In this installment, Peter Larkin (b. New Forest, Hampshire, UK, 1946) reads “Yardley Oak” by William Cowper. Larkin is the author of two large poetry collections, Terrain Seed Scarcity (2001) and Leaves of Field (2006), as well as many smaller pamphlets. He ran Prest Roots Press from the late '80s until three years ago. He works at Warwick University Library and has published a number of academic papers on the Romantic poets.

William Cowper, "Yardley Oak"

Survivor sole, and hardly such, of all
That once lived here, thy brethren, at my birth
(Since which I number threescore winters past,)
A shattered veteran, hollow-trunked perhaps
As now, and with excoriate forks deform,
Relicts of ages! Could a mind imbued
With truth from Heaven created thing adore,
I might with reverence kneel and worship thee.
It seems idolatry with some excuse
When our forefather druids in their oaks
Imagined sanctity. The conscience yet

Unpurified by an authentic act
Of amnesty, the meed of blood divine,
Loved not the light, but gloomy into gloom
Of thickest shades, like Adam after taste
Of fruit proscribed, as to a refuge, fled.

Thou wast a bauble once; a cup and ball,
Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay
Seeking her food, with ease might have purloined
The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down
Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs
And all thine embryo vastness, at a gulp.
But fate thy growth decreed. Autumnal rains
Beneath thy parent tree mellowed the soil
Designed thy cradle, and a skipping deer
With pointed hoof dibbling the glebe, prepared
The soft receptacle in which secure
Thy rudiments should sleep the winter through.
So Fancy dreams. Disprove it if you can
Ye reasoners broad awake, whose busy search
Of argument, employed too oft amiss,
Sifts half the pleasures of short life away.
Thou fell'st mature, and in the loamy clod
Swelling, with vegetative force instinct
Didst burst thine egg, as theirs the fabled twins
Now stars, two lobes protruding paired exact.
A leaf succeeded, and another leaf,
And all the elements thy puny growth
Fostering propitious, thou becamest a twig.
Who lived when thou wast such? Oh could’st thou speak
As in Dodona once thy kindred trees
Oracular, I would not curious ask
The future, best unknown, but at thy mouth
Inquisitive, the less ambiguous past.
By thee I might correct, erroneous oft,
The clock of history, facts and events
Timing more punctual, unrecorded facts
Recovering, and mis-stated setting right.
Desperate attempt till trees shall speak again!

Time made thee what thou wast, king of the woods.
And Time hath made thee what thou art, a cave
For owls to roost in. Once thy spreading boughs
O'erhung the champaign, and the numerous flock
That grazed it stood beneath that ample cope
Uncrowded, yet safe-sheltered from the storm.
No flock frequents thee now; thou hast outlived
Thy popularity, and art become
(Unless verse rescue thee awhile) a thing
Forgotten as the foliage of thy youth.

While thus through all the stages thou hast pushed
Of tree-ship, first a seedling hid in grass,
Then twig, then sapling, and, as century rolled
Slow after century, a giant bulk
Of girth enormous with moss-cushioned root
Upheaved above the soil, and sides embossed
With prominent wens globose, till at the last
The rottenness which Time is charged to inflict
On other mighty ones found also thee -
What exhibitions various hath the world
Witnessed of mutability in all
That we account most durable below!

Change is the diet on which all subsist
Created changeable, and change at last
Destroys them. Skies uncertain, now the heat
Transmitting cloudless, and the solar beam
Now quenching in a boundless sea of clouds,
Calm and alternate storm, moisture and drought,
Invigorate by turns the springs of life
In all that live, plant, animal, and man,
And in conclusion mar them. Nature's threads,
Fine, passing thought, even in her coarsest works,
Delight in agitation, yet sustain
The force that agitates not unimpaired,
But worn by frequent impulse, to the cause
Of their best tone their dissolution owe.

Thought cannot spend itself comparing still
The great and little of thy lot, thy growth
From almost nullity into a state
Of matchless grandeur, and declension thence
Slow into such magnificent decay.
Time was, when settling on thy leaf a fly
Could shake thee to the root, and time has been
When tempests could not. At thy firmest age
Thou hadst within thy bole solid contents
That might have ribbed the sides or planked the deck
Of some flagged admiral, and tortuous arms,
The shipwright's darling treasure, didst present
To the four-quartered winds, robust and bold,
Warped into tough knee-timber, many a load.
But the axe spared thee; in those thriftier days
Oaks fell not, hewn by thousands, to supply
The bottomless demands of contest waged
For senatorial honours. Thus to Time
The task was left to whittle thee away
With his sly scythe, whose ever-nibbling edge
Noiseless, an atom and an atom more
Disjoining from the rest, has unobserved
Achieved a labour, which had far and wide,
(By man performed) made all the forest ring.

Embowelled now, and of thy ancient self
Possessing nought but the scooped rind that seems
An huge throat calling to the clouds for drink
Which it would give in riv’lets to thy root,
Thou temptest none, but rather much forbidd'st
The feller's toil, which thou couldst ill requite.
Yet is thy root sincere, sound as the rock,
A quarry of stout spurs and knotted fangs
Which crook'd into a thousand whimsies, clasp
The stubborn soil, and hold thee still erect.
So stands a kingdom whose foundations yet
Fail not, in virtue and in wisdom laid,
Though all the superstructure by the tooth
Pulverised of venality, a shell
Stands now, and semblance only of itself.
Thine arms have left thee. Winds have rent them off
Long since, and rovers of the forest wild
With bow and shaft, have burnt them. Some have left
A splintered stump bleached to a snowy white,
And some memorial none where once they grew.
Yet life still lingers in thee, and puts forth
Proof not contemptible of what she can
Even where death predominates. The spring
Thee finds not less alive to her sweet force
Than yonder upstarts of the neighbour wood
So much their juniors, who their birth received
Half a millennium since the date of thine.

But since, although well-qualified by age
To teach, no spirit dwells in thee, nor voice
May be expected from thee, seated here
On thy distorted root, with hearers none
Or prompter save the scene, I will perform
Myself the oracle, and will discourse
In my own ear such matter as I may.

One man alone, the Father of us all,
Drew not his life from woman; never gazed
With mute unconsciousness of what he saw
On all around him; learned not by degrees,
Nor owed articulation to his ear;
But moulded by his maker into man
At once, upstood intelligent, surveyed
All creatures, with precision understood
Their purport, uses, properties, assign'd
To each his name significant, and, filled
With love and wisdom, rendered back to heaven
In praise harmonious the first air he drew.
He was excused the penalties of dull
Minority; no tutor charged his hand
With the thought-tracing quill, or tasked his mind
With problems. History, not wanted yet,
Leaned on her elbow, watching Time, whose course
Eventful should supply her with a theme....